When my work with Morris Milgram came to an end in 1960, Marj and I decided we should make nonviolent action a full-time occupation. The summer before, we had helped organize the national CNVA-sponsored Polaris Action Project. We focused on the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut, where the Polaris nuclear submarines were being built and where the U. S. Navy had a submarine base. We selected Electric Boat as a target for action because the rationale for building these submarines was the dubious notion that they provided defense against Soviet aggression. We all know, however, that what they could provide was mutual destruction—the so-called deterrence theory, which is no longer popular. Building submarines also provided needed jobs for some 5000 workers.

In keeping with our decision we decided to move to Connecticut, as close as possible to Groton, where the subs were being built. We were helped in this move by one of our supporters, who donated the money for us to buy a $17,000 farm in Voluntown. During the 1960s the farm became the base from which CNVA launched virtually all of its demonstrations. The farm consisted of forty acres, thirty wooded and the remainder open fields around the buildings. We moved into the large New England farmhouse, where from eight to ten people lived at all times. We also had a few outbuildings that we made into living spaces. Everyone participated in decision-making.

Our entire budget for all living expenses including food, transport, utilities, etc., was around $20,000 per year. We raised all this money from our New England mailing list. No one received a salary for working with CNVA, and all expenses came out of the same pot. We lived modestly, buying most of our food at wholesale markets, where clerks would save things like overripe bananas for us. Not having to pay a mortgage was a big help. We did pay all local taxes.

At one point we had a visitor from India, who had lived in one of Gandhi's ashrams. She said that our Voluntown group was more like an Indian ashram than any other place she had seen in the United States. Ashrams are spiritual communities led by a guru. Gandhi changed the focus of the ashram from spiritual development to nonviolent social action.

Our family lived on the third floor of the old farmhouse. I remodeled it so that we were reasonably comfortable. Soon after we moved there our two oldest girls were offered a scholarship to a private school. This left Carol and her younger brother, Scott, to face the not-very-friendly kids at public school. We lived in a rural area close to Groton, where the submarines were being built. People in the community depended on the work supplied by the base, and they thought all of us living at the farm were communists. The kids bore the brunt of the ridicule at school. Although they survived this period, it was not the easiest time in their lives. For Carol, the interaction with the many young people who came into the ashram was some compensation for enduring the school life. For Scott it was more difficult. Although he got a lot of attention from the young people, it probably didn't make up for the school, which he hated.

One of the buildings on the farm was an old barn we used for storage. It was about fifty or sixty feet from the house. One night we looked out the only window on the third floor to see flames coming out of the barn. Someone else had already seen them and called the voluntary fire department, which was not far away. In a few minutes the firemen arrived, but the fire was already too out of control for the barn to be saved. All the firemen could do was keep the hoses turned on the house to save it from going with the barn. One of our older members had put all of her belongings in the barn—including some of her dead husband's music compositions, which she valued highly. That was the only major loss from the fire. In looking for clues to how it started, the firemen discovered pieces of a rope that had been soaked in kerosene and put inside the barn. We couldn't understand how someone had succeeded in placing the rope there without being seen, but from then on we kept a vigil outside at night.

Nevertheless, it happened again—not a fire but a real armed invasion. Marj and I happened to be up in Maine and didn't know about it until we got home. One of the superpatriotic groups called the Minutemen had been planning this invasion for many months. They didn't know, however, that the state police had a spy within their group. One night two of the Minutemen, armed with shotguns, walked in the back door of our farmhouse and ordered the three CNVA members who were in the room to sit down. Just at that moment one of the police officers, dressed in civilian clothes, came in and yelled to the Minutemen to put down their guns. But he was so nervous that he accidentally pulled the trigger on his shotgun. The tiny shells of the shotgun sprayed a two-inch hole in the leg of one of our members, who was sitting only five feet away. Of course, the police officer rushed her to the hospital, where she stayed for a couple of weeks; the Minutemen spent longer than that in jail. From then on, there were no more incidents.

Our first actions were vigils held regularly at the entrance of the Electric Boat Company. As the workers would arrive and leave from the submarine construction work, they would first ask, "Why don't you go tell the Russians?" and then, less belligerently, "Where are we going to find jobs?" It seemed to become clearer each day that the real force driving the arms race, then as now, was the need to create jobs and keep the economy going. These workers weren't nearly as afraid of Russia as they were of losing their jobs. Once in a while a worker would confide to us in private that this was true. We carried out dozens of protest actions, including walks from Maine to the United Nations, from Philadelphia to the United Nations, and from Baltimore to Washington.

The culminating walk was from San Francisco to Moscow in 1961, ending in front of the Kremlin. It called for an end to the arms race and let workers in this country know that we were indeed "telling the Russians." This walk lasted for ten months, "the longest most arduous pacifist journey ever undertaken." It was the "first breakthrough in the arms race," according to an editorial in the New York Herald Tribune. Jervis Anderson refers to the walk in his biography of Bayard Rustin:

It is a long time since any group of foreigners has been permitted to challenge that enforced conformity [in the Soviet Union]. Inhabitants of Moscow have had their first taste of the kind of diversity that exists in the West. . . . Through this tiny chink in the Iron Curtain a few seminal ideas have penetrated. They may not affect the current crisis, but they may grow.

Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen: A Biography
[Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1997, p. 233]

In addition to the numerous walks and almost constant vigils at the Electric Boat Company, we organized events to dramatize the danger of nuclear submarines for the civilized world. They could unleash a nuclear war in which it would not be worth walking around the corner to see what was left (to paraphrase Thoreau's "I wouldn't walk around the corner to see the world blow up"). One of the actions we planned was to stop the first nuclear submarine from being launched. The idea was somehow to take canoes or rowboats to the point just below where the submarine would enter the water. This was to take place at the exact time of the launching, with thousands of people watching. As usual, we had notified officials of the Navy and Electric Boat of our plans, but we didn't tell them exactly where on the Thames River we were going to launch our boats. They were not prepared, therefore, and couldn't stop us from putting our boats into the water. Even though they were in motorized Coast Guard boats, it took some time for their security forces to catch up with our canoes and rowboats. And when two of our young members, who had come prepared with bathing suits, dove into the cold water, the guards couldn't prevent them from climbing on board the submarine, much to everyone's amazement. The security forces eventually managed to round all of us up and charged us with violating a long-forgotten law written in World War I to try to prevent spies from using the river. The next morning the Providence, Rhode Island, newspaper had a front page picture of Don Martin standing on the front of the sub with the caption, "Moral Courage." This was the first sign of sympathy we had from local people. The picture was carried by the Associated Press and later was selected as one of the best photos of the year.

Being the oldest, I was considered the ringleader and therefore received a three-month sentence under Federal Law. So it was back to prison. This time I was sent to the Danbury, Connecticut, Federal Correctional Institution. Being familiar with Federal prison rules (no segregation now), I told the officer in charge that I wanted to spend my time studying. He was very cooperative and gave me a job that required only one or two hours every night changing the television stations for my fellow prisoners, who would look over the TV schedule early in the day and vote for the show they wanted to watch. Then I would add up the votes and change the channel accordingly. I sat within a fenced-in corridor, and all the other prisoners sat in the "recreation" room on the other side of a heavy wire fence watching television. Because I couldn't actually see the TV, I had lots of time for reading and study. During the day I stayed in my dormitory room, reading and writing. Friends brought in all the books I wanted. One of them by Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, influenced my thinking tremendously. This period in jail, like the first one during the war, gave me time to think through what I wanted to do.